I think I can say, after some deliberation, that I love The Spoils, which is an album by Zola Jesus. "After some deliberation" because there are several directions your attention can go when listening to The Spoils, and some of them tend in exactly the opposite direction of where I'm thinking I've actually ended up. When I thought that, maybe, I didn't like it, my thoughts were along the lines of a creed I have sort of adopted, one which I encourage others to consider, to wit: I don't care about the eighties or how cool you think they were. Eighties fetishism in itself is about as cool as strawman ex-hippies rhapsodizing about what a great time it was when the music really meant something. There is too much of it afoot now. It should be assaulted on all fronts.

But of course my creed, for all its appeal, is as ridiculous as eighties fetishism itself; the mish-mash of styles we loosely mean by "eighties" when referring to indie/alt music genres really was a pretty interesting moment, precisely because it was so scattershot. Did the eighties begin with FACT 10 (actually June 1979) and end with FACT 220 (actually November 1988)? Does it not really get its legs under it until HMS16 (March 1985)? What is the most certain signifier for "80s": a bass guitar put through a chorus pedal and a delay, an 808, or heavy echo on the vocals? Didn't Prince pretty much do all the things we mean by "the eighties," and a whole bunch more, at the pop level instead of at the bubbling-under-and-excavated-twenty-years-later one? What are we leaving out of the eighties when we describe a piece of music as sounding like it came from the eighties?

But in the end I am OK with a little eighties fetishism despite my lingering suspicions. I am OK with it because some eighties fetishists are making really interesting music. Zola Jesus is one of them. Warren Ellis says she sounds like Danielle Dax; I hear that, and Siouxsie too, though not the Siouxsie of Juju - what I hear is what I remember about hearing Join Hands through the shitty stereo at the punk rock house in Claremont while high. Which is the general vibe of the album: a room with dirty carpeting and some electronic music equipment and a person using it to make songs she can sing, whose lyrics will be obscured by filters and effects until they are only occasionally comprehensible, like a loud voice in a house next door clarifying itself from time to time when the person yelling walks past an open window.

That the overall sound of The Spoils is without question an aesthetic choice arrived at early in the process of becoming (rather than an aesthetic choice made after listening to the recordings some band, pick one, made after visiting a studio in Manchester or Boston or Manhattan circa 1982) is the sticking point: do you care? I don't. After some deliberation, I just don't. I think about it a little, but in the end, I've got the album, and the words I can wrestle from the choices it's made about how it wants to sound, and I've got the sleeve art, which seems to reference those early-eighties Nico albums that everybody loves now and nobody bought back then. And what I come away with is a lost but not too darkly-lost collection of songs which seems, really, to use its own fetishistic tendencies as a tool rather than as an end in itself, and which takes its source materials and really goes someplace with them. Which is why I love it, despite my allergy to anything that suggests nostalgia. It's really not very impressive to have heard a lot of 80s music; all music is free now to everybody. It is impressive to have heard a lot of 80s music and then created a musical persona who might have occupied a space entirely its own, had it existed in the period in which its eventual existence was made possible. It is impressive to have located the lacunae and set up house in one of them. It is worth a pretty close look.

For a couple of weeks I have been struggling to figure out what I might tell you about Love and Curses by Reigning Sound. It arrived in my mailbox, the physical one (which I think is important to how things ended up between me & Love and Curses: its pathway to reception), and I thought, oh, hey, Reigning Sound, Chas at Bull City Records thought Too Much Guitar! was pretty much the best thing ever and I bought it on his recommendation and thought it was good but not as great as he did.

I forget whether Love and Curses sat on the dining room table for a day or two or three, though it's likely that it did, though in my own defense I want to say that I've been trying to give promos a spin the second they arrive so that I know whether to hang onto them or not before they end up scurrying off to the corners from which they won't get retrieved for days or months or years. At any rate, when I played it, alone on a weekend evening in the house & doing nothing in particular besides sitting at the dining room table listening to CDs through the trusty old boombox that I hauled out of mothballs for no particular reason a while back, it sort of knocked me over from its first chord.

But at this point, telling you more about it is going to be difficult, because it's just a rock and roll record, albeit a better one than I've heard all year. Every song on it is really good, and most of them are great; it is beautifully written, sung, played and recorded. Every time I play it, which is pretty much daily right now, I end up saying "man!" several times, stopping whatever I'm doing to look over at the Sony Radio Cassette-Corder CFD S-26 and just stare at it while truly outstanding music spills out from its speakers, which, let's face it, are not the greatest speakers of all time. But they do the trick; they get the music out to me, and I hear it with real wonder, which is as rare for me now as it probably is for anybody else who lives in the age of constantly available musical accompaniment. The band playing on it sounds like Dylan's backing band for Blonde on Blonde, but the songs are Dylanesque at all; they're more between classic Velvets in the pop mode ("Foggy Notion," "Beginning to See the Light," "Head Held High") and the Shangri-La's. For me to compare anything to the Shangri-La's is for me to say "I love this unreservedly." But beyond that, what can I say? The mood of each song is fully realized, and individual; the vocal performance throughout is more persuasive than any vocal performance I've heard this year; the real love lavished on the overall sound elevates the album from what might otherwise come across as a genre exercise.

I had sort of thought that I was past the point of being impressed by this style of music; I thought that the Cheater Slicks & Monoshock, both more extreme and less song-driven than Reigning Sound, had kind of finished it off for me. But Reigning Sound is in the class of both those acts: there is a depth of creativity here that you'd usually expect from people trying to break new ground instead of exploring established domains. I can't really blame anybody who feels like straight-ahead 60s-style rock music has nothing left to say to him; if I never heard another record from the 60s I guess I'd be OK with that. But this is different somehow. If I were retagging its genre, I'd call it "Occult Brain," which is something that makes intuitive sense to me & which I'm not going to try to explain. I wish singer Greg Cartwright were telling a more general truth when he sang "like the salt that fills the sea/there'll be plenty more like me/back where I came from," though. But he's not, so seek out Love and Curses. It is singular.

Finland has been bringing some of the sickest loud bands since forever, and everybody knows it. There was a period there circa '86 I want to say when it seemed like every week at the local punk emporium was This New Finnish 7" Is The Sickest Thing Ever week. Finnish metal bands are always last in line behind Norwegian and Swedish bands, and in fairness, Norway and Sweden are always going to be the final bosses in some senses, but reliably, every couple of years, I'll get some record from Finland that makes me want to say: get yours, Finland. You have always brought your own thing, and sometimes your thing hits everybody else's thing on the head with a hammer, and eats the brains on national television. And so it is with Irritate's Ten Stabs of Demented Violence, whose title will surely turn off anybody who must have something artsy in his metal, and whose cover is practically custom-made to fill me with glee. I'm not gonna go into a huge thing about it, what's the point, either you go for filthy sludge death about blood or you don't, but anybody who ever had some guy in a 'hawk tell you about the latest & fastest from Helsinki & remembers the experience fondly might wanna check out the slower, dirtier latter-day version of that impulse, because it's rad.

Too busy from now til probably sometime next year to update more than three sentences at a time maximum but wanted to say quickly that the new Polvo album is frankly unbelievable. Love every song on it & mean that in both the understood-first-person & imperative-second-person sense. Three numbers among the secret powerful seven, more news on that before the next ice age, see you then.